Becker's Medicine, Law and the State in Imperial Russia

Elisa Becker's book is a brilliant study of the conjuncture of law and forensic medicine that sheds new light on the evolution of the professions in late Imperial Russia following the Great Reforms. Theoretically sophisticated and based on a wide range of archival and heretofore unexamined primary documents, it is a model of multi-disciplinary history. The great strength of the study and its originality rests on her ability to view the different perspectives of the two professional outlooks, their contrasting discourses and their interaction on the political level. Her work further informs the discussions in post-Soviet Russia, formulated in historical terms, over the struggle of the professions to establish a newly founded autonomy along Western lines that contrasted from the experience of both the tsarist and Soviet periods. The study will have a broad appeal, to specialists in Russian social history, the history of science and the comparative history of the professions.